Black Friday

November 25, 2016 – 2:49 pm

A scene from earlier today:

This is what happens when all connections to anything beyond atomistic individualism, and mere presentist materiality, are severed. This is what it looks like when all of the horizontal ligatures, organic hierarchy, and embedding in past and future time that give a culture health, harmony and order are deliberately and patiently destroyed.

Expect more and more of this as civilized norms perish. Soon we’ll be calling it Red Friday.

Annual tut-tutting over November’s Running Of The Fools is justified enough, but unscrupulous sellers need to shoulder a little blame along with avaricious buyers, even if the lion’s share belongs to the latter. These stampedes are the product of fairly blatant bait-and-switch tactics, the oldest retail con in the book. ApplianceMart distributes a flyer showing a new big-screen TV at just 40% its normal price, but neglects to mention that they only have three of them in stock (retailers’ profit margins on televisions being razor-thin to begin with). Once the suckers are through the door, they see lots of “On Sale!” tags, but the “sale” price barely differs from the ordinary mid-July price.

It’s hard to censure any retail business for doing what’s necessary to stay afloat in a harsh modern market, but it’s still lamentable that sharp dealing and trickery have so completely supplanted attempts to win long-term customer loyalty. Business in 21st-century America seems to mostly consist of swindling large numbers of low-IQ people out of their money. Granted, low-IQ people don’t usually have much money, but there are enough of them to make it worthwhile if practiced on a grand scale.

A colleague of mine who formerly worked in retail has called Black Friday “the one day of the year we could tell customers exactly what we were thinking”, by which he meant that he could express his honest contempt for their whining. Having worked several customer-facing jobs in the past, I can personally affirm that his contempt is not wholly unjustified (check out the website “Not Always Right” for a sample), but it’s still depressing. Avarice, swindling, and mutual contempt are all immutable parts of the fallen human condition, but did we really need to enshrine them with a de facto national holiday?

Black Friday may also decline as working-class shoppers realize that their goods are now increasingly being made by other Americans, who are, just like them, demanding high wages for doing it. The shoppers would of course normally applaud that, but they’re demanding those wages out of the shoppers’ pockets. The shoppers may well be okay with that, but seeing some of them learn Economics 101 will be interesting.